Starmer says Tory ministers have ‘serious questions’ to answer about Afghan data leak – UK politics live

<p>PM says he would welcome inquiry after exposure of major data breach under Tories that revealed details of Afghans who supported British forces</p><ul><li><p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/15/afghan-nationals-arrived-uk-under-response-route-afghanistan">Afghan nationals: have you arrived in the UK under the Afghanistan Response Route?</a></p></li></ul><p>In an interview with LBC <strong>Ben Wallace</strong>, the former Tory defence secretary, hit back at his former ministerial colleague Johnny Mercer rather more forcefully than he did on the Today programme (see<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2025/jul/16/afghan-resettlement-data-leak-pmqs-latest-live-politics-news-updates?page=with%3Ablock-687746458f08f900d609f3c0#block-687746458f08f900d609f3c0"> 8.09am</a>) over Mercer’s comments about the Afghan resettlement programme.</p><p><strong>Tom Swarbrick</strong>, the presenter, quoted what Mercer said about how this “whole farcical process has been the most hapless display of ineptitude by successive ministers and officials that I saw in my time in government”.</p><p>No, I don’t agree with it. I think my record would show the opposite. It was me and Priti Patel, before the collapse of Kabul, who decided we were going to accelerate bringing people back who were under threat …</p><p>People hadn’t come out before. And we made sure that we did this. I think what Johnny, you know, fails to grasp, is quite the massive scale of collapse that happened very quickly in Afghanistan, leaving people at risk, and we had to do our very best.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2025/jul/16/afghan-resettlement-data-leak-pmqs-latest-live-politics-news-updates">Continue reading...</a>